Australia's politicians caught mind-tampering the public

By Ian Warden

March 30, 2018 — 4.16pm

At the same time that our cricketers have been tampering with cricket balls the federal treasurer, that national treasure Scott Morrison, has been tampering with Australians' minds. Which of these sins is the most wicked?

And in the same unflinching way we tackle another Big Question of our time. We ask what would happen if we had not yet chosen the site of our federal capital city and tried to choose one today, in today's filthy and opportunistic Australian political climate?

But just to digress for a moment, I thanked Heaven as I beetled along to this week's wonderful ACT International Pro Tour women's Clay Court event at the National Tennis Centre that there seems to be no known way in which tennis players can tamper with tennis balls! Our blushing nation is agog with shame at the ways our cricketers have tampered with a cricket ball.

I play a lot of tennis and play to win and if I knew of a way of tampering with tennis balls to my advantage I might be tempted to try it. Moved by the cricket ball imbroglio I have an open can of new Slazenger Wimbledon Ball highvis balls at my elbow. I have been examining these canary yellow objects (so far in vain) for any possibility of tampering with them as effectively as Scott Morrison tampers with naïve minds.

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Thank heavens too, as those highlights of the Canberra winter the Premier League soccer and the NIHL ice hockey get under way (Go, legendary Tuggeranong FC! Go mighty CBR Brave!) there seem to be no known ways to machiavellianly tamper with a football, with a hockey puck.

He has been saying it is a plot to rob the frail elderly, Labor pouncing to rip grannies' handbags from them at gunpoint, sending older Australians reeling into a gutter of poverty where all they'll be able to eat is dog food, if they're lucky.

Morrison, using fear, is playing with, tampering with minds. An artful dodger, he is very, very good at it too while our cricketers, less artful, bungled their ball-tampering. But of course it is far easier to tamper with something so soft, wet and malleable as the minds of today's Australians (has our nation ever been so dumb?) than with a sturdy no-nonsense cricket ball. Cricket balls have a leathery scepticism about them.

The Grattan Institute has come up with a fact-filled refutation of what it calls Morrison's "deeply misleading" fibbing on this issue. But of course few Australians, let alone the wild-eyed retirees sent stampeding by his lies, will read the intellectually-demanding reports of the Grattan Institute.

Among those despairing at the present state of Australian political discourse has been Professor Ian Chubb. The former chief scientist has worked with eight prime ministers and a galaxy of ministers and is not impressed by the sorts of people we choose to lead us.

"We [the Australian people] have to do something about it. We [the people] get what we let happen to us," he pined this week in an ABC Radio National interview. Thinking readers with thinking ears will find it still available online to thinking ears as Expediency trumping integrity in Australia's political leaders.

Today Chubb is distressed by the shallow and slogany "purely oppositional" state of politics, the absence of any thought for what kind of nation we want to be in the hereafter.

In his interview this week with ABC Radio National (still available at Expediency trumping integrity in Australia's political leaders) he makes special mention of the mindless trivia of the oppositional response to Labor's imputation idea. It was just a suggestion about tax policy, but, he laments, was greeted as a plot for "theft, robbery. Stealing".

In the interview the professor contrasts today's "purely oppositional" politics with the way in which Henry Parkes and other men of vision and of co-operative goodwill somehow managed to achieve federation of our nation.

And they did this, Chubb marvelled, in spite of major political differences and hostilities and "without a twitter account or an iPhone between them".

Similarly, methought, listening to that, parliamentarians of vision and co-operative goodwill (and without a twitter account, iPhone or facebook page between them) somehow got their skates on and within a very few years of federation had painstakingly looked for and then chosen a place for a federal capital city. And getting a statesmanlike wriggle-on they quickly commenced to build it.

Could so sensible and workmanlike and nation-building a political miracle happen today? Wouldn't today's Scott Morrisons (the parliament is littered with these economical-with-the-truth treasures) lie about any political opponent's suggested site? Wouldn't they say, even of an idyllic spot beside the musically babbling Molonglo on the lush Limestone Plains, that it was an impossible place?

Wouldn't they allege that it was a hell of cannibals, dragons, plagues, quicksands and three-headed monster grumbletonians, its foetid lakes and rivers teeming with piranhas and man-eating hammerhead platypuses?

Lucky Australia, that this great issue was decided and the capital city plonked in this paradise early in the 20th century, before our politicians evolved into today's mind-tampering, opportunistic, fibbing flibbertigibbets.